Implementation experience with MANET routing protocols

This paper outlines our experience with the implementation and deployment of two MANET routing protocols on a five node, four hop, network. The work was prompted by the lack of published results concerning the issues associated with the implementation of MANET routing protocols on actual wireless networks, as opposed to results of simulation experiments. We examined implementations of two distance vector MANET routing protocols and found a number of problems with both protocols during the course of our experiments. The most significant was that neither protocol could provide a stable route over any multi-hop network connection. The route discovery process of both protocols is fooled by the transient availability of network links to nodes that were more than one hop away. Packets transmitted over a fading channel cause the routing protocol to conclude incorrectly that there is a new one hop neighbor that could provide a lower metric (hop count) route to even more distant nodes. This ca...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CCR
• Authors: Kwan Wu Chin, John Judge, Aidan Williams, Roger Kermode
• Keywords: CCR 2002, Distance Vector Manet, MANET, Routing